We performed a comparison between IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and OpenText Service Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software."The solution is very easy to work with."
"The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the most important for us."
"The brand name is the most valuable aspect of this solution for me. It's IBM. It's a global company that supports this product, it's not something open source or something like that."
"A feature I found most valuable in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is the service request. Another feature I like most about the solution is IT asset management, which tells you who owns a specific asset in the company and from which date."
"The workflow capability is useful. It's not a manual helpdesk operation. It's fully automated, even when an alarm has occurred. It covers the complete cycle of initiation to resolving the events. This is its most strong feature that is easily integrable with a monitoring solution. It creates tickets, and the workflow feature is the most important one."
"What I like about the Control Desk is that everything is centralized. You have all the requests in one place, you know which ones are for whom and who is working on them."
"In the early stages of our company, all requests were done in notebooks, and none of it was centrally managed. But now we have a central tool which is an entry point for all requests that come in."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"The solution will streamline productivity and also improve automation. That would bring efficiency as well the ability to handle a big number of enterprise-wide service needs. Productivity and collaborative capabilities are some of the key benefits."
"It's pretty well-structured in modules."
"It gives us better understanding and control of service management."
"Service Manager does what it should, but it's quite outdated."
"Service Manager's best features are flexibility and customizability."
"Service Manager gives us a single system where everything is centralized in one base."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is fine. It's a good solution for small accounts with minimal reporting. Micro Focus is a good option because you don't have to worry about the budget."
"A valuable feature for us is that we have an ordered way to handle all the cases that we can handle with the infrastructure."
"The main issue that we hear from our customers is that the self-service user interface is a little bit old, possibly due to the fact that IBM is such a large enterprise company. People say that they think they're in the year 2004, because you can very clearly see that the technology is lagging behind modern trends."
"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"Support has been the biggest problem for us. I understand that because we use the product of a global company, some changes are not quick to deploy."
"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"The time calculations can be improved. While working on reports, it was taking the time only in seconds, which was hard for me to work out. While creating some dialogs in the service portal, you have to use certain data types in some fields. It was very tricky to make them work. I was testing a certain type of input, and it didn't work. It didn't show me the domain that the fields have to show. I had to make the change to the database, and only then it worked. It was a tricky thing to make them work with the dialogs. Their technical support can also be improved in terms of response time."
"The user interface is not very interesting. If you look at other products like JIRA and ServiceNow, they have made it much easier for the end-users. Maybe not ServiceNow, but JIRA is quite flexible. From a presentation point of view, IBM should make more user-friendly interfaces."
"What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most common comment I get from customers is that IBM SmartCloud Control Desk looks old and needs a refresh. Its frontend needs a little bit of work. The solution needs to be more modern. In the programming world, you see a lot of new technologies, but this particular solution is still on Java. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk isn't like web-based service request tools, and that's an area for improvement. What I'd like to see in the next version of the solution is a more upscale technology. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has small issues with document links and attachments, and those could bother you when you're using it for a long time. A more user-friendly GUI is also another improvement I'd like to see in the next version of the solution, plus a better user experience, and it would be great if IBM could resolve the current issues I've noticed in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."
"It needs good integration with the configuration database, that's lacking at the moment, It's not that good."
"Their end-user interface and technical support features could be improved."
"I think one area which is the most painful from my point of view is if you need to integrate a lot of the tools, and being able to make that a lot more seamless."
"I think the best recommendation to Micro Focus would be to increase awareness and the marketing for this product."
"Service Manager would be improved with access to automation."
"The product's technical support services need improvement."
"With the new version moving toward the codeless configuration is good, but it's losing flexibility."
"The user interface is very clunky. It's only now beginning to be a web-based interface, but for now it's still very clunky."
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is ranked 22nd in Help Desk Software with 9 reviews while OpenText Service Manager is ranked 17th in Help Desk Software with 48 reviews. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is rated 7.6, while OpenText Service Manager is rated 7.2. The top reviewer of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk writes "Stable but clunky and lacks a user interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText Service Manager writes "A solution that works out of the box. The solution's real strength is its ability to change for your organization's infrastructure". IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is most compared with ServiceNow and SymphonyAI IT Service Management, whereas OpenText Service Manager is most compared with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, OpenText Service Management Automation X (SMAX) and BMC Helix ITSM.
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